The Enron sideshow
By Jackson Murphy
web posted January 28, 2002
Follow the money. That is the advice journalists learned from
'Deep Throat' in the Watergate scandal-and it would seem at
times it was the only thing they learned. Those simple three
words are the key to understanding how any scandal in
Washington gains momentum. But as it turns out nearly
everyone in Washington took money from Enron over the past
dozen years-the money leads out like the tentacles of an
octopus. The whole beltway may have to be recused at this rate.
The collapse of Enron, the seventh largest corporation in
America, has caught the eye of key Democrats and pundits as a
chance to fight the incredibly popular president. They thought
that the Enron meltdown could be tied to the Bush administration
especially since the Bush campaign took so much money from
them. Since it appears that the administration did nothing to help
Enron when it got in trouble the scandal seems to be contained
as simply a terrible financial mess. Those trying to proclaim this
as Bush's "Whitewater" or "Enrongate" have been preoccupied
with the appearance of impropriety instead of understanding
what really happened.
It is telling when the promising political scandal devolves into a
strange pundit scandal. This interesting sideshow that has
developed has nothing to do with Bush or politicians; instead the
trail of money is leading to a variety of pundits and journalists.
Many have taken money from Enron over the years including the
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
In the case of Krugman most don't believe that he has done
anything wrong. To be fair, he has devoted many of his recent
columns to the Enron affair and they don't paint a pretty picture
for Enron. Unfortunately, he has gone as far as to suggest that,
"the administration fears, and the press suspects, that the latest
revelations in the Enron affair will raise the lid on crony
capitalism, American style."
Krugman has basically blamed this on unfair conservative
criticism. "Conservative newspapers and columnists made a
concerted effort to portray me as a guilty party in the Enron
scandal. Why? Because in 1999, before coming to The New
York Times, I was briefly paid to serve on an Enron advisory
board," wrote Krugman. This is the classic Clintonian bait and
switch: I'm not the problem the right wing media is the problem.
The man acting like the grand inquisitor is Andrew Sullivan, a
conservative writer and pundit. Not only has Sullivan not singled
out Krugman, he has criticized four other individuals for the same
thing-all of them 'conservative'.
The others: William Kristol (editor of the Weekly Standard),
Lawrence Kudlow (National Review and CNBC commentator),
Irwin Stelzer (Contributing editor of the Weekly Standard), and
Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal) have all been on Enron
advisory boards or did other work over the years.
Instead of this being a conspiracy against liberal pundits by
conservatives it has become the biggest bipartisan show in town.
The real question then is whether or not disclosure by these
pundits means they are off the hook?
Sullivan asks, "Isn't there some cloud inherently over Krugman's
and Noonan's subsequent writing about Enron? At least some of
their readers now suspect something fishy went on. Haven't these
pundits essentially undermined themselves as independent
watchdogs of the culture? Isn't the entire point of the press to be
independent - observers of problems not part of them?"
Sullivan is devastatingly correct. Most readers of newspapers
rightly want to have the columns they read without wondering in
the back of their minds why a pundit is being so critical on a
given subject-or worse why he is not. So when Krugman writes
about crony capitalism he might want to practice what he
preaches. Mark Steyn in the National Post concludes that,
"Perhaps at the very least the laughably hypocritical Professor
could stop lecturing us lessers on the evils of greedy capitalism."
If Krugman says, basically, "look I took money from Enron but I
have been trashing them so I'm clean leave me alone", shouldn't
Bush be able to say, "of course I took money from 'Kenboy', I
am not stupid you know, but I just let that company self-destruct
so I'm clean, leave me alone."
For his part Bush was seen leaving the White House in the last
week with a copy of the New York Times number one
bestseller, "Bias" under his arm. The book, "Bias: A CBS Insider
Exposes How the Media Distort the News" by Bernard
Goldberg has become a smash hit for trying to expose media
bias. Was this a not too subtle message to his friends in the press
corps to wise up because he is on to them-the message that the
media has spent plenty of time looking at Bush at not near
enough looking at its own columnists and employees.
Jackson Murphy is a commentator from Vancouver, Canada.
He is the editor of "Dispatches" a website that serves up political
commentary 24-7. [URL: http://www.dispatches.blogspot.com/]
You can contact him at jacksonmurphy@telus.net.
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